Being Radically Different for the Kingdom of God

31st Sunday in Ordinary Time C - Readings: 2 Maccabees 7:1–2, 9–14; 2 Thessalonians 2:16–3:5; Luke 20:27–38

(Icon of Christ Pantocrator from Macedonia, 14th C)

Listen to my audio homily

"Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive." (Luke 28:38)

We are God's making. He created us in his image and likeness. God did not fashion death, he didn’t make it.  Could we go further, then, and see in death some kind of advantage?  The horizon is a helpful boundary to our vision. The frame of a painting can highlight the beauty and value of what is contained within.  St Ambrose recalls that ‘death was not of God’s fashioning’ (Wis 1:13) but goes on to argue that God gave us death as a 'remedy’ for our sinful and pitiful condition: ‘Deathlessness is no blessing but only a weariness if grace does not transfigure it.’ 

"God didn’t make death. God takes no delight in the ruin of anything that lives.  God created everything so that it might exist.  The creative forces at work in the cosmos are life-giving.  There is no destructive poison in them.  The underworld[a] doesn’t rule on earth." [Wisdom 1:13-15 Common English Bible (CEB)] Further the book of Wisdom says, "God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.  But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them." [Wisdom 2: 23] 

We can start to become reconciled to our mortality when we learn to see death as a new beginning, not merely an end.  God is our future and He is our end.  This is the faith of the saints.  St Thomas More, the day before his martyrdom, wrote to his daughter Margaret Roper, praying that ‘we maie merily meete in heaven’. 

We will not see our end instead we will see our end in God.  If God brings forth life in us, will he not give us life even if our bodies get old, die and decomposed.  Our life after this earthly pilgrimage would be absolutely different from what we have now with all its culture, tradition, system, norms, values, patterns of seasons, etc.  Certainly, it would be another new beginning in God.

Therefore, Jesus calls us to be radically different form others but for the sake of the Kingdom. Our existential questions will have meaning only in God. Only God can give meaning to our lives.

- Olvin Veigas, SJ

10 November 2019